This blog is affiliated with a course at the School of Journalism & Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. I'll try to use it to share relevant news and information with the class, and anyone else who's interested.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Future of mobile - Nokia Human Form

There's a lot of people envisioning what the future holds for mobile technology and mobile devices. Here's a report on Nokia's vision, contributed by David Comm -

Recently the engineers at Nokia have been working on a concept of a phone that could revolutionize the world of mobile phones…it’s called the Nokia Human Form. Of course, this is still just a concept…not yet a phone. However, it is based off of the Nokia Kinetic Device which IS real, so the Human Form is not complete fiction.
The Kinetic Device is a concept phone that Nokia developed that is flexible…yes, flexible. Instead of buttons, the Kinetic Device is controlled by bending, twisting, and squeezing. It was unveiled at Nokia World 2011 at London’s Excel Centre. The phone was unveiled by Tapani Jokinen, Nokia’s Head of Design, Technology Insights. Tapani said that while there is a touch screen on the phone it goes “beyond it.”

This is the technology that will be used in the Human Form, plus a little. The Human Form will look like no other phone…it looks like a min surfboard, it is thin, transparent, and flexible. Not only that but it can mold to your ear when you talk and can mold to you leg while in your pocket. If that wasn’t enough, a particularly cool feature is the tactile sensory touch that accompanies a photograph, so when you look at a picture, your skin can interpret the surface of that particular object by simply touching it, as if they were virtually right there in front of you. Again, this is still just a concept, so it will be years before this could even be possible, but you can still see a really cool video of Nokia’s vision of the Human Form here. From Nokia PR comes this description: